>VMWare does not give a virtual machine access to >the raw PCI bus (nor the ensuing interrupts). That would be suicidal. >It would damage security and sharing but would be great for efficiency >and transparency. It would make it easy to support a lot of devices.
Thats exactly right, The problem is that to replicate the pci card, you can't work with a generic abstracted memory model, you have to keep a correspondance between the guests memory and the hosts (its real, low level memory) memory, if they did have a "virtual pci bus" then you could build it in a much more abstract way and you wouldn't have to worry about things like busmastering. Sure its a hard job ............. but some company will do it eventually. Again the important thing is now that the source is viewable, if companies like digium or sangoma see a market in building drivers for vmware, then they can do it.I don't think this will ever be one of those things that someone would do as a hobby. > On the other hand, Xen does in some cases give the client machines > direct PCI bus access. Which is the main reason why they will make it for xen before vmware. The vmware kernel is very simple compared to xen, and there already are t1 virtualizations for xen..........
